I absolutely agree with them. With the big budget games I've bought previously, I've also tended to download and apply cracks to be on the safe side - not just in case their DRM screws up my system, but also to get rid of needing the disc in all the time. There has always been temptation, though, to simply screw them over like they've screwed me over in the past, and get a pirate copy of the game.
I personally have re-bought over a dozen games I previously owned from GOG.com - they've made an effort to create automatic installers for all the older games, and it's a lot easier than breaking out the discs again. Particularly for some of the larger games, like Pandora Directive, which came on 6 CDs.
Don't they have bigger issues/bad guys to take care of than some college student POSSIBLY playing PIRATED VIDEO GAMES? Drugs, gangs, violence, terrorism, rape, murders...need I go on?
last time I checked the courts and jails were rather full...
Reminds me of the Simpsons X-Files episode: Mulder: There's been another unsubstantiated UFO sighting in the Heartland of America. We've gotta get there right away. Scully: Well... gee, Mulder, there's also this report of a shipment of drugs and illegal weapons coming into New Jersey tonight. Mulder: [scoffs] I hardly think the FBI is concerned with matters like that.
Basically, they lied. dipshits. And how the hell did that Rosario guy knew that cd was pirated in the first place anyway ? did he understand it from its smell ? cd wasnt labeled ? what if the guy made a backup ? huh ?
That's a very good question, and precisely what I was wondering myself - how could they be so sure that it was a pirated game, and not a backup of a game he legitimately owned? Given the original article said that they had to prove he knew/was breaking the law, I can't see how they could prove that it was indeed a pirated game. Or did they previously execute a search warrant to see if he had the original disc for the game or not?
I can't agree more wholeheartedly with the above (unclear specifications). I see it all the time in my business too.
If you go to the folllowing page: http://slashweb.org/programming/25-best-programmer-comics.html [top 25 programmer jokes], one is the classic Dilbert strip where Alice tries to nail down a client's specifications... one of my favourite jokes of all time.
Well, the Quest for Glory series used the later Sierra SCI engine rather than the AGI engine. Luckily, the ScummVM project has recently merged in FreeSCI, which will, eventually, enable users to play all the Sierra SCI games on all the various systems and consoles that ScummVM supports.
The most well known attempt to create an interpreter for SCI games, FreeSCI, has recently been merged into the ScummVM project. Development has been going on rapidly since then, and some SCI games are already completable, with support for more to follow.
Note though that this is only in the daily SVN builds, not in the 0.13 stable builds.
You know.. I was all ready to hate them for not making the new sensor backwards compatible with older games, but then it occurred to me that it says that the new motion sensor hooks into the base of the existing Wiimote. It may simply be that the connection there for peripherals/nunchuks doesn't allow the new sensor to supercede the existing Wiimote movement sensors.. that may be why only new games will be able to make use of the extra information.
Of course we could then always argue that Nintendo should have re-designed the Wiimote from scratch with the new sensor embedded if that's the case. If so, I would hope that they do, because there are a lot of existing Wii games that would benefit from the extra sensitivity.
It's ironic that for all that it was a milestone in the development of CGI in movies, the way things are getting more and more screwed up in America, years from now no-one will be able to watch it anymore.
I read an article recently at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2007/3/28/132751/380 - the department of Homeland Security has classified Tron as "sensitive" because some locations were filmed at a nuclear research facility, and they're worried about 25 year old nuclear secrets being revealed. They're apparently currently trying to seize all of the footage from Disney and get all copies of the movie pulled from stores.
There's also the new flash-based games website for the Wii at http://wiicade.com/
All the games have been designed to be used with a mouse or remote, so can be used with the newly released Wii browser. I've tried some of the puzzle games already, and they're pretty fun.
Since there isn't a huge run on used SNES systems going on right now, I'd say that excitement over the ability to play old games for it is nowhere nearly as high as some people seem to think.
maybe the reason is that it's simply impossible to get most of the old games legally anymore.. unless you happen to be in a capital city in the US, perhaps; over here in Australia, even in the big second hand places like Cash Converters, they rarely have more than a few old cartridges for sale. So you could forget about getting a specific game like, say, Chrono Trigger, unless you're willing to pay through the nose on eBay - just checking the AU listings, there was a copy for sale with a "Buy It Now" of AU$210.
Let's see.. buy a single cartridge for $210, plus the old console for ~$50, or spend approximately $350 for the new Wii console and only US$5 for the game. I personally think the original game cartridges can go get stuffed.. I'll buy a Wii and gladly pay just US$5 for the game.
Another costing factor, which doesn't seem to have been mentioned yet, is pretesting and Quality control. Screenshots from E3 showed the Virtual Console games with special help screens (controller functions) for each game. This is indicative that Nintendo will be making an effort to properly test each game and prepare whatever documentation is required online - and some of them (particularly RPGs) will probably need quite a few help screens.
Add this all up and a price of $5 to $10 is really quite reasonable, considering the number of man hours likely to be required to internally test each game. Now that would be a fun job - being paid to play old games all day to make sure they work on the new system.:)
It may not be as impossible as one might think. One of the more promising noises coming from Nintendo is that the developer kits would be low priced. Add to that the browser based capability of the Wii, and it adds up to Wii games being much easier to produce and distribute by independant developers and/or companies.
I suspect we'll see a lot of companies making games available cheaply for the Wii, which is one of the reasons why I'm so looking forward to it.
All fossils can tell is that either evolution *may* have happened, or that God has a sense of humour, and knew there'd need to be something to occupy paleoentologists in future milleniums when he created the world.
Think Terry Prattchet's book Strata, and you'll get what I mean.:)
I RTFA and nowhere did it state anything about creationism; it only said, and with good reason, that the material was a *theory* and not a *fact*.. which is correct. If we don't take creationism as a fact anymore, why should be expected to take evolution as one, irrespective of how many people believe in it (and exactly the same used to be said of creationism as well).
Likely the particular judge just had a bug up his arse about religion, and came down heavy on it because he, like many zealots, don't like their beliefs to be challenged, irrespective of whether they're religious or not.
If I were in charge of that school, and had decided not to go through appeals, I'd first send the judge personally a bill for the removal of all the stickers from the books. I mean, if he wants them removed so much, he should damn well pay for it himself rather than expecting hard-worked teachers to spend hours of time doing it themselves.
Does anyone else remember the Well World series by Jack Chalker? The main character, Nathan Brazil, said pretty much the same thing - randomness had interfered in Earth's development such that it follows our current history - the USSR collapsed and the cold war ended; and without anyone to challenge the US and keep them active the space program suffered as a result.
He was right on the mark. The US needs to have a strong competitor. Otherwise it just tends to stagnate.
If you believe this, then maybe you're ready to believe the prattle Borland gives that Delphi should be pronounced as Del-pheye, and not as Del-phee as we all know it's meant to be pronounced:)
Whilst it's great that the Unisys patent is expiring, I'm somewhat curious about IBM patent 4,814,746, which also somewhat covers LZW compression. According to US Patent 4,814,746, it covers somewhat of the same area as the UniSys. I know there has been some confusion between the two, although most people seem to agree that the UniSys patent was more applicable to the GIF format than the IBM patent.
I'm curious if anyone knows whether the IBM patent has also expired? Or if not, when it is set to expire - that's the one thing I haven't been able to find out. I'm not familiar with patent law, so I don't know whether the patent period is fixed or variable.
Even if it is now expired, it would probably be of benefit for somewhat more familiar with the two patents to discuss the differences between them. I'm sure other Slashdotters would be interested to find out.
I've been actively following the progress of Nuvie (http://nuvie.sourceforge.net), which is an emulator to run Ultima 6 on newer computers - many of the files used LZW compression to compress the data - this was back in the days of floppys, where disk space was at a premium. The fact that the LZW patent is expiring will be a blessing for them and other such projects - they won't need to tiptoe around worrying whether they're violating the patent anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
You may not be able to arrest an idea, but it seems you can arrest the person.
I absolutely agree with them. With the big budget games I've bought previously, I've also tended to download and apply cracks to be on the safe side - not just in case their DRM screws up my system, but also to get rid of needing the disc in all the time. There has always been temptation, though, to simply screw them over like they've screwed me over in the past, and get a pirate copy of the game.
I personally have re-bought over a dozen games I previously owned from GOG.com - they've made an effort to create automatic installers for all the older games, and it's a lot easier than breaking out the discs again. Particularly for some of the larger games, like Pandora Directive, which came on 6 CDs.
For those who don't already know, Infamous Adventures also released a remake of Kings Quest III some time back - http://www.infamous-adventures.com/
Two websites I've enjoyed for tech horror stories are:
Tech Tales [http://www.techtales.com/]
Clients From Hell [http://clientsfromhell.net/]
Don't they have bigger issues/bad guys to take care of than some college student POSSIBLY playing PIRATED VIDEO GAMES?
Drugs, gangs, violence, terrorism, rape, murders...need I go on?
last time I checked the courts and jails were rather full...
Reminds me of the Simpsons X-Files episode:
Mulder: There's been another unsubstantiated UFO sighting in the Heartland of America. We've gotta get there right away.
Scully: Well... gee, Mulder, there's also this report of a shipment of drugs and illegal weapons coming into New Jersey tonight.
Mulder: [scoffs] I hardly think the FBI is concerned with matters like that.
---
DreamMaster.
Basically, they lied. dipshits. And how the hell did that Rosario guy knew that cd was pirated in the first place anyway ? did he understand it from its smell ? cd wasnt labeled ? what if the guy made a backup ? huh ?
That's a very good question, and precisely what I was wondering myself - how could they be so sure that it was a pirated game, and not a backup of a game he legitimately owned? Given the original article said that they had to prove he knew/was breaking the law, I can't see how they could prove that it was indeed a pirated game. Or did they previously execute a search warrant to see if he had the original disc for the game or not?
DreamMaster.
Maybe he should move to Switzerland. If the example set by Roman Polanski.is anything to go by, the country's a haven for accused sex offenders.
Reminds me of one of my all time favourite comics, from the www.vgcats.com website:
http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=122
Titled 'Fire bad, FIRE BAD!' :)
I can't agree more wholeheartedly with the above (unclear specifications). I see it all the time in my business too.
If you go to the folllowing page: http://slashweb.org/programming/25-best-programmer-comics.html [top 25 programmer jokes], one is the classic Dilbert strip where Alice tries to nail down a client's specifications... one of my favourite jokes of all time.
Well, the Quest for Glory series used the later Sierra SCI engine rather than the AGI engine. Luckily, the ScummVM project has recently merged in FreeSCI, which will, eventually, enable users to play all the Sierra SCI games on all the various systems and consoles that ScummVM supports.
The most well known attempt to create an interpreter for SCI games, FreeSCI, has recently been merged into the ScummVM project. Development has been going on rapidly since then, and some SCI games are already completable, with support for more to follow.
Note though that this is only in the daily SVN builds, not in the 0.13 stable builds.
You know.. I was all ready to hate them for not making the new sensor backwards compatible with older games, but then it occurred to me that it says that the new motion sensor hooks into the base of the existing Wiimote. It may simply be that the connection there for peripherals/nunchuks doesn't allow the new sensor to supercede the existing Wiimote movement sensors.. that may be why only new games will be able to make use of the extra information.
Of course we could then always argue that Nintendo should have re-designed the Wiimote from scratch with the new sensor embedded if that's the case. If so, I would hope that they do, because there are a lot of existing Wii games that would benefit from the extra sensitivity.
It's ironic that for all that it was a milestone in the development of CGI in movies, the way things are getting more and more screwed up in America, years from now no-one will be able to watch it anymore.
0 - the department of Homeland Security has classified Tron as "sensitive" because some locations were filmed at a nuclear research facility, and they're worried about 25 year old nuclear secrets being revealed. They're apparently currently trying to seize all of the footage from Disney and get all copies of the movie pulled from stores.
I read an article recently at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2007/3/28/132751/38
There's also the new flash-based games website for the Wii at http://wiicade.com/
All the games have been designed to be used with a mouse or remote, so can be used with the newly released Wii browser. I've tried some of the puzzle games already, and they're pretty fun.
maybe the reason is that it's simply impossible to get most of the old games legally anymore.. unless you happen to be in a capital city in the US, perhaps; over here in Australia, even in the big second hand places like Cash Converters, they rarely have more than a few old cartridges for sale. So you could forget about getting a specific game like, say, Chrono Trigger, unless you're willing to pay through the nose on eBay - just checking the AU listings, there was a copy for sale with a "Buy It Now" of AU$210.
Let's see.. buy a single cartridge for $210, plus the old console for ~$50, or spend approximately $350 for the new Wii console and only US$5 for the game. I personally think the original game cartridges can go get stuffed.. I'll buy a Wii and gladly pay just US$5 for the game.
Another costing factor, which doesn't seem to have been mentioned yet, is pretesting and Quality control. Screenshots from E3 showed the Virtual Console games with special help screens (controller functions) for each game. This is indicative that Nintendo will be making an effort to properly test each game and prepare whatever documentation is required online - and some of them (particularly RPGs) will probably need quite a few help screens.
:)
Add this all up and a price of $5 to $10 is really quite reasonable, considering the number of man hours likely to be required to internally test each game. Now that would be a fun job - being paid to play old games all day to make sure they work on the new system.
It may not be as impossible as one might think. One of the more promising noises coming from Nintendo is that the developer kits would be low priced. Add to that the browser based capability of the Wii, and it adds up to Wii games being much easier to produce and distribute by independant developers and/or companies.
I suspect we'll see a lot of companies making games available cheaply for the Wii, which is one of the reasons why I'm so looking forward to it.
All fossils can tell is that either evolution *may* have happened, or that God has a sense of humour, and knew there'd need to be something to occupy paleoentologists in future milleniums when he created the world.
:)
Think Terry Prattchet's book Strata, and you'll get what I mean.
I RTFA and nowhere did it state anything about creationism; it only said, and with good reason, that the material was a *theory* and not a *fact*.. which is correct. If we don't take creationism as a fact anymore, why should be expected to take evolution as one, irrespective of how many people believe in it (and exactly the same used to be said of creationism as well).
Likely the particular judge just had a bug up his arse about religion, and came down heavy on it because he, like many zealots, don't like their beliefs to be challenged, irrespective of whether they're religious or not.
If I were in charge of that school, and had decided not to go through appeals, I'd first send the judge personally a bill for the removal of all the stickers from the books. I mean, if he wants them removed so much, he should damn well pay for it himself rather than expecting hard-worked teachers to spend hours of time doing it themselves.
Maybe it's a carefully crafted clue leading to the Templar treasure. :)
Does anyone else remember the Well World series by Jack Chalker? The main character, Nathan Brazil, said pretty much the same thing - randomness had interfered in Earth's development such that it follows our current history - the USSR collapsed and the cold war ended; and without anyone to challenge the US and keep them active the space program suffered as a result.
He was right on the mark. The US needs to have a strong competitor. Otherwise it just tends to stagnate.
If you believe this, then maybe you're ready to believe the prattle Borland gives that Delphi should be pronounced as Del-pheye, and not as Del-phee as we all know it's meant to be pronounced :)
I'm curious if anyone knows whether the IBM patent has also expired? Or if not, when it is set to expire - that's the one thing I haven't been able to find out. I'm not familiar with patent law, so I don't know whether the patent period is fixed or variable.
Even if it is now expired, it would probably be of benefit for somewhat more familiar with the two patents to discuss the differences between them. I'm sure other Slashdotters would be interested to find out.
I've been actively following the progress of Nuvie (http://nuvie.sourceforge.net), which is an emulator to run Ultima 6 on newer computers - many of the files used LZW compression to compress the data - this was back in the days of floppys, where disk space was at a premium. The fact that the LZW patent is expiring will be a blessing for them and other such projects - they won't need to tiptoe around worrying whether they're violating the patent anymore.
Stage one was to flood him with real junk mail. Now Stage 2 is to sue his arse off :)